CityAM Op-ed on Blockchain Technology and Friedrich von Hayek

I had an op-ed published by CityAM last Friday, it goes into how blockchain technology will enable FA Hayek’s vision of an economy that is free of the control of central bankers and bureaucrats:

Many countries have experimented with price fixing and central planning over the last century. Right now, Venezuela’s government is fixing the prices of many products. This has resulted in widespread shortages of goods which we, as the lucky inhabitants of semi-free economies, take for granted.

Price fixing has failed in every area of the economy in which it has been tried. But while few serious economists would suggest that we have a team of bureaucrats set the price of rubber, wheat or coffee, we do have one sphere of the economy which is still centrally planned – our monetary system. This will fail just like all central planning fails. We are now moving into a dangerous new phase of price fixing by central banks. Having failed to stimulate economies with years of zero per cent interest rates, they are now discussing the prospect of negative interest rates (and some have even introduced them), the reductio ad absurdum of modern monetary economics.